I'm the CEO of TiqIQ.com, which is the leading ticket search engine online. I started my professional career as a writer covering New York technology in 1996. I've been fascinated by the ticket market from a young age and remember trying to understand what drove the market in front of Yankee Stadium and Madison Square Garden. After working in eCommerce for much of my career, I decided to start a company dedicated to tracking those prices with the benefit of technology and helping consumers get the best possible deals.

Jim Rice’s career average at Fenway Park was 43 points higher than games away from Fenway Park. Many attribute that to the Green Monster, the thirty-seven foot-high left-field wall that has been watching over Red Sox games for 112 years. Across those thousands of games, the wall has disproportionally benefited right-handed pull hitters like Rice. Another Red Sox pull hitter that benefited from the wall was Nomar Garciaparra. Garciaparra’s batting average at Fenway was 25 points higher than his career average. In addition to being a national landmark and the highlight of Bucky Dent’s career, those higher batting averages has has been the monster’s most enduring legacy to date. After years of adding to righties batting average, though, the Green Monster will now be adding a few points to Red Sox bottom line. With the announcement today that Red Sox tickets on the Green Monster will be priced dynamically, the Red Sox are likely to generate an extra $2 to $4 million of incremental revenue.

The Red Sox announcement that they’d be moving to dynamic pricing for the 247 seats atop their famous Green Monster isn’t exactly news. These days, almost all major league baseball teams use some form of dynamic pricing. New additions to the dynamic marketplace include Baltimore Orioles tickets and Cincinnati Reds tickets who will join other teams that use some type of dynamic pricing including the Arizona Diamondbacks, Atlanta Braves, Chicago Cubs, Chicago White Sox, Colorado Rockies, Milwaukee Brewers, Minnesota Twins, New York Mets, Oakland Athletics, San Diego Padres, St. Louis Cardinals and Toronto Blue Jays. The Reds have adopted a ‘conservative’ use of dynamic in which prices never go below season ticket prices. That means that even if the Reds tank this year, there’s a built in floor. Green Monster tickets are a rare example of teams using dynamic pricing as a tool to reflect true market demand. Season ticket holders, who are sprinkled throughout most sections of a stadium, usually complicate dynamic pricing. The Green Monster seats, however, are free of any of season tickets legacy, as monster seats are all sold on a game-by-game basis. Of course, given the limited supply of Monster tickets, it’s unlikely that the Red Sox will do anything other than increase prices for monster seats.

Last year, Green Monster tickets had a face price of $165. While supply on the secondary market is usually limited to under 10 tickets each game, secondary-market ticket prices typically range from $250 to $450. For the sixth and clinching game of last year’s World Series, there were four tickets available on the secondary market for $4,726 each, which was about 250% above the average price for the game overall. At 81 games over the course of the season, our calculation assumed an average free-market price of $350, which would mean an incremental $185 of revenue each game. For conservatism’s sake, we discounted that to $150 of incremental revenue per seat per game. With 20,000 Monster seats to sell over the course of the season, that equates to a clean $3,000,000 of incremental revenue for the World Champions–perhaps just enough to cover the addition of right-handed pull hitter at the trade deadline.

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